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START JOURNALING

Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with

it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into

your brain.

—JACK LONDON

or her thirteenth birthday, a precocious German refugee named
Anne Frank was given a small red-and-white “autograph book”
by her parents. Although the pages were designed to collect the
signatures and memories of friends, she knew from the moment she
first saw it in a store window that she would use it as a journal. As
Anne wrote in her first entry on June 12, 1942, “I hope I will be able
to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in
anyone, and I hope you’ll be a great source of comfort and support.”
No one could have anticipated just how much comfort and
support she’d need. Twenty-four days after that first entry, Anne and
her Jewish family were forced into hiding, in the cramped attic annex
over her father’s warehouse in Amsterdam. It’s where they would
spend the next two years, hoping the Nazis would not discover them.
Anne Frank had wanted a diary for understandable reasons. She
was a teenager. She had been lonely, scared, and bored before, but
now she was cooped up in a set of cramped, suffocating rooms with
six other people. It was all so overwhelming, all so unfair and
unfamiliar. She needed somewhere to put those feelings.
According to her father, Otto, Anne didn’t write every day, but
she always wrote when she was upset or dealing with a problem. She